“But I’m A Cheerleader!”

No, I don’t know what that’s from, but it was a request from one of my first subscribers, so I will humor him for the moment. You’re welcome, Bob.

But that’s not exactly what I’m intending to write about tonight. I’m intending to write about spring.

I know that I live int he U.P. and if I don’t like the weather I should just wait around for five minutes. This week, we’re back into winter after a few weeks of gorgeous spring weather. The robins are back, and now are shivering. There have been multiple sets of birds and squirrels ‘Twitterpated’ in our back yard (I now wonder if they’re running just to keep warm). A Good friend’s dog is noticeably molting all over the house.

But it’s back down into the 20’s, and a frigid 15 degrees tonight. DEFinitely not what you’d call ‘spring’ by any stretch of the imagination.

So this ‘cold snap’ has prompted a great deal of rumbling and grumbling within my online friends. The same people who declared it ‘spring’ a few weeks ago are now lamenting the fact that they’ve lost that lovely weather and now have to pull BACK out their winter jackets for about a week.

This isn’t taking into account that there is ALWAYS a snow storm of some sort for my father’s birthday, April 9th. This is not taking into account the year that (I’m told) it snowed on July 4th. This is not taking into account the fact that they live in the U.P. for heavens’ sakes!

But it has gotten me thinking about boundaries. Sure, we have declared it spring on some scientific calendar as of March 20th. But does that really mean anything? Obviously the weather isn’t cooperating, but the trees are all budding, so SOMEthing thinks that it’s spring. The trees are also the ones who stubbornly start changing colors in the 90-degree-September years, too, so maybe they’re on to something.

But we know that we can’t go out and run around like we would in real spring. It’s cold enough that a guest at the hotel asked us if there was anywhere to go snowmobiling tomorrow. If we’d had the snow we usually get, they probably could have.

So when can we really declare it spring? When can we really declare it winter? It usually starts snowing before the established date, but it doesn’t get REALLY bad until January, most years. And don’t even ask about February.

So I guess we all need to re-evaluate our boundaries. Make sure we know where they really are before we declare proudly that it’s spring. Make sure that we don’t get grumbley when it does what’s natural and bounces back to winter just to prove that it can. And make sure that we’re ready for anything when it comes to weather (we actually had thunder-snow-storms the other morning.)

And no, I haven’t been a cheerleader since 5th grade, so it’s not about that, either.

Cool! You know, I think I heard about this movie about a year ago, but since it wasn’t available anywhere up here, I forgot about wanting to see it, then forgot the title. Bob said he’d just heard about it somewhere recently and thought it was a good title to a post. *shrugs* I suppose people can infer from it what they will.